The people of France were tired of the awful earnestness which had characterized the philosophical and political upheavals of the eighteenth century, and were ever more and more eager for glory and for pleasure. This was true of all political schools, excepting only a very few men of serious minds. The masses had come to loathe royalty. They were living under what was called a republic, and when an expression was needed for the national life as a whole they and their writers employed the common classical term "empire." The word "citizen," used in both genders as a form of address, recalled the days of rude leveling. It had lasted through the Directory; with the Consulate it disappeared, first from official documents, and then, in spite of resistance by a few radicals, it soon gave place everywhere to the old "monsieur" and "madame." In like manner the former habits of polite society quietly reasserted themselves with the return to prominence of those who had been trained in them. Liberty could no longer be endangered by admirable usages whose connection with monarchy was forgotten. Such incidents were significant of the movement which, with the assured stability of the Consulate, brought immediately to its service those persons who represented, not exactly the greatness, but the capacity of France. Excepting that which was resident in a few royalists and in a few radicals, the power of the nation rallied to the support of the new order. When Daunou, Cabanis, Grégoire, Carnot, and Lafayette were identified with the Consulate, the Jacobinism which had turned the early nobility of the Revolution into baseness might well hide its head. For a time, at least, the majority believed that the highest aims of the Revolution were to be attained under the new government.